Many Splendors Page 3

  “I’ve got to finish this journal, and then there’s the paper I promised to JAWM that I really need to finish. And I may wind up pulling a double, if the wunderkind’s team asks for another sensor recalibration.”

  “Oh God, another one?” Lian rose from the table and laughed. “How many different ways can they scan these planets?”

  “I’m starting to think it’s infinite.” The young “acting ensign”—Wesley Crusher—had been put in charge of a team of Enterprise science officers to determine why all the planets in the Selcundi Drema sector suffered from horrendous geological instability. The team hadn’t made much progress, but it wasn’t for lack of finding new and more interesting ways of scanning a planet’s surface over the past several weeks.

  “In any event,” Lian said, “me and some others have been getting together in Ten-Forward to chat and gossip and such. It’s myself, Costa, Van Mayter, and Allenby.”

  Sonya vaguely recognized the other names—the first two were engineers, and Allenby was a shuttle pilot, maybe—but said only, “I don’t have time, Lian, honest. There’s just so much to do.”

  Lian walked over to the replicator to recycle the oatmeal bowl. Shaking her head, she said, “Sonya, one of these days you need to relax. Maybe go on a date yourself. What about that Duffy guy?”

  Sonya blinked. She’d hardly thought about Duffy since the Iconian mess, and hadn’t seen him except to pass in the corridor once or twice. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, you should still come to Ten-Forward. For one thing,” she said with a feral grin, “I’ve gotten some really good gossip. Do you know that Data’s been talking to some girl on one of the Dreman planets?”

  Sonya looked askance at Lian. “That’s crazy. Isn’t that a Prime Directive violation? Data isn’t capable of that, is he?”

  Lian shrugged. “He’s sentient, remember? To my mind, that makes him capable of anything.”

  Now it was Sonya’s turn to grin. “Weren’t you the one saying he was just an android?”

  “Maybe I was wrong.” Lian went to the door. “I’ve got to get to breakfast. If you change your mind, we’ll be in Ten-Forward, at the corner table, at 1930.” With that, she left.

  Sighing, Sonya finished reading the doctor’s article. When she was done, she thought on Lian’s words. Perhaps she should write the letter; perhaps she did need to slow down; and perhaps she should see how Kieran Duffy spent his off-duty time.

  The computer startled her out of her reverie. “Ensign Gomez, you have received a communiqué from Belinda Gomez on Earth.”

  Getting up and stretching, Sonya said, “Put it on the screen.” She turned to face the wall with the viewscreen, which lit to life with the Federation logo, followed by the round face of Sonya’s older sister.

  “Hey, Ess, it’s me. Just wanted to check in with you on your big old starship. I got your last letter, and I’m not sure what scares me more. First you say that your captain was duplicated and that three of your crewmates were trapped in a re-creation of a bad novel. Then you talk about those inspectors from the starbase checking over your work. The part that scares me is that you didn’t think the first part was a big deal, but you wouldn’t stop complaining about the second part. You’re weird, Ess, you know that?

  “Anyhow, all’s well on the home front. Looks like we’re going to the Federation Cup again this year. We’ve just got one more game to go, but I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to nail it down. We just have to beat the Stars tomorrow night, but their goalie’s a pushover.

  “I had dinner with Mami and Papi last night—they’re doing well. Papi says you don’t write enough, but that just means you only write once a day. Anyhow, I gotta go. Talk to you later, Ess!”

  Sonya shook her head. Belinda’s soccer team was going to the Federation Cup. Again. The last time they played the Stars, Belinda scored all three goals in a 3–0 victory.

  And she got to see their parents more often, being on Earth.

  All thoughts of acceding to Lian’s requests left her mind. She couldn’t afford to take the time for letters to journals or gossiping in Ten-Forward or going on a date—not when she had her sister the famous soccer player to live up to.

  When Sonya arrived in engineering for her shift, Clancy was waiting for her. “I’ve got some news, Sonya. When we’re done in Selcundi Drema, there’ll be some changes.”

  Sonya didn’t like the sound of that at all.

  “Don’t worry,” Clancy said quickly, “they’re good changes. There’ll be some crew rotation, is all. Ensign Gibson’s transferring off, and I’m taking over beta shift at conn.”

  Sonya’s eyes widened. “You’re getting bridge duty? Ella, that’s great!”

  Clancy smiled. She’d been bucking for bridge duty since before Sonya came on board. “And you’re getting bumped up, too. La Forge wants you on alpha.”

  Her stomach dropping, Sonya said, “Alpha shift?”

  “It’s a great opportunity,” Clancy said, as if Sonya didn’t know that.

  “Oh, definitely. Absolutely. This’ll be great.” Sonya let out a breath as Clancy smiled at her and headed over to another part of engineering.

  This is going to be a disaster, Sonya thought, crestfallen. Working right under La Forge’s nose? I’ll never be able to live up to that standard.

  “Excuse me, are you Ensign Clancy?”

  Sonya looked up from the console to see the wunderkind himself. “No, I’m Ensign Gomez.”

  “Oh, sorry—Wesley Crusher.” The young man offered his hand, and Sonya took it. He had a firm grip. “I’m heading up the team looking into the—”

  “—geologic instability, I know,” Sonya said with a smile. “What do you guys need this time?”

  “An icospectrogram. The problem is, stellar cartography’s using the starboard sensor array for their mapping, and if they stop what they’re doing to give us the sensor nodes we need, they’ll have to start over.”

  Sonya chuckled. It sounded like the young man had been rehearsing that speech before coming in here. “Can you use the port array?”

  “The problem is I need five—”

  “—contiguous arrays to make it work, so I need to reassign nodes four, seven, and eight in order to give you guys enough to work with, right?”

  The kid grinned. She couldn’t help but grin back—the kid’s enthusiasm was infectious. “That’s right. Thanks a lot, Ensign, I really appreciate it.”

  “It’s not a problem, and call me Sonya.” She felt ridiculous being called “Ensign” by this kid for some reason. “Give me a few minutes to finish up what I’m doing here, and then I’m all yours.”

  As Sonya completed the diagnostic she was in the midst of, she couldn’t help but ask, “Why are you running an icogram, anyhow? You think there’s dilithium on these planets?”

  “There might be, yeah. Ensign Davies found indications of tracher deposits.”

  Sonya nodded. “And where there’s tracher, there’s dilithium. Makes sense. You definitely want to be as thorough as possible.”

  “Exactly what I said!” Wesley got a wide-eyed look that Sonya had seen all too often in the mirror. “Davies thought it might be a fool’s echo, but Commander Riker put me in charge of finding out what’s happening, and we’ve got to cover all our bases.”

  “Yeah, but”—Sonya took one last look at the diagnostic, saw it was compiling normally, then turned to face Wesley—“dilithium wouldn’t explain this instability. I mean, you’d need more dilithium than there’s ever been in one place, and not even Archer IX has that much dilithium.”

  “Maybe.” Wesley seemed a bit deflated. “It might be a dead end, but we’ve got to be sure. Besides, it can’t hurt to find out if there’s another source of dilithium.”

  “True.” Sonya smiled. “All right, then, let’s go redistribute the sensors.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  Memo from Ensign Esmeralda Clancy to Lieutenant Geordi La Forge, stardate 42760.9. I believe that Ensign Sonya Gomez bears watching. She has one of the finest engineering minds I’ve ever seen, but she’s in danger of burning herself out. She has tremendous drive, but to the exclusion of all else. I’ve never seen her in Ten-Forward, she’s never booked leisure time on the holodeck, she’s constantly working extra shifts, and I’ve never seen her socializing with anyone beyond her roommate. It’s my recommendation that she be given more guidance than I’ve been able to provide.

  Alpha shift hadn’t been as bad as Sonya had feared. Although Geordi La Forge was a perfectionist, he wasn’t an unreasonable one, and he never asked his people to do anything they couldn’t. He was very hands-on, to the point where Sonya wondered why he bothered even having a staff, but he could delegate when it was called for.

  She also saw a lot more of Wesley Crusher. Although nominally assigned to the bridge as the alpha-shift conn officer, Wesley—partly in preparation for his Academy studies, partly due to the kid’s sheer brilliance—also did quite a bit of work in engineering. The icogram he’d requested had been the right call, as had Sonya’s caveat. It would indeed take more dilithium than had ever been recorded to have it be the reason for the geologic stresses wracking Selcundi Drema, but that’s just what the icogram found on Drema IV. The Enterprise was also able to prevent that world from being destroyed, thus saving its native civilization. Sonya had heard a lot more rumors like the one Lian told her about Data talking to a girl on the surface, and several people had said they saw Data walking the corridors with an alien child nobody recognized, but again, Sonya didn’t put much stock in the rumors.

  She did, however, put stock in Wesley. The kid was the genuine article. They’d spoken a few times since she switched to alpha, regularly interrupting each other and throwing ideas back and forth.

  When she had her first break on her third day on alpha, she walked over to the replicator near the corridor entrance and requested a hot chocolate.

  Laughter from her left caused her to look up to see La Forge chuckling and walking over to her. “We, uh—we don’t ordinarily say ‘please’ to food dispensers around here.”

  Sonya smiled. Lian had said much the same thing when she ended her first dinner request with a “please,” and she gave La Forge the same answer she had given Lian then: “Well, since it’s listed as intelligent circuitry, why not?” However, with Lian, she’d stopped there. Now, she went on. “After all, working with so much artificial intelligence can be dehumanizing, right? So why not combat that tendency with a little simple courtesy?” Turning to the replicator, she reached for the hot chocolate and said, “Ah, thank you.”

  “For someone who just arrived, you certainly aren’t shy with your opinions.” As La Forge spoke, he walked into main engineering.

  Sonya absently followed him, gripping the hot chocolate with both hands, and realizing she should’ve cut herself off. Lian was used to her babbling, as was Ella, and Wesley had been babbling right back. But with La Forge…“Have I been talking too much?”

  “No.” La Forge said the word emphatically, but Sonya wasn’t having any of it.

  “Oh, I do have a tendency to have a bit of a motormouth, especially when I’m excited.” Or awake. “And you don’t know how exciting it is to have gotten this assignment.” And then, suddenly, before her brain could tell her mouth to shut the hell up, her mouth barreled forward with The Speech. “Everyone in class, I mean everyone, wants the Enterprise.” Wanted, you idiot, you’re not a cadet anymore! “I mean, it would’ve been all right to spend some time on Rana VI, do phase work with antimatter—that’s my specialty.”

  “I know,” La Forge said, “that’s why you got this assignment.”

  Sonya’s stomach started doing cartwheels. He knows my specialty! Then she mentally berated herself. Of course he knows my specialty, he’s the chief engineer. He doesn’t just take people sight unseen. Shaking her head, she said, “I did it again. It’s just that—”

  La Forge’s voice was soothing. “I know—you’re excited. Look, Sonya—”

  Eager to receive whatever wisdom the chief engineer was going to provide, she said, “Yes?”

  “I don’t think you want to be around these control stations with that hot chocolate, do you?”

  She looked down at the hot chocolate, as if seeing it for the first time. “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t even have this in engineering. It’s just, we were talking, I forgot I had it in my hand.” She started to back away from La Forge with almost the same speed with which she was digging herself into a hole verbally. Just shut up and walk away. “I’m gonna go finish it over here.”

  Realizing as she walked that that probably wasn’t the best way to end the conversation, she stopped, turned, and faced her CO. “Lieutenant La Forge?”

  He nodded.

  “This is not gonna happen again.”

  Again, he nodded. Satisfied that she hadn’t embarrassed herself too terribly much, and at the very least pulled it out at the end, as it were, she nodded back and turned around, intending to take the hot chocolate to the corridor.

  As she turned, she crashed right into someone wearing a red uniform.

  Great, that’s all I need. Someone on the command track getting hot chocolate all over their uniform wasn’t exactly going to help Sonya do better with La Forge.

  Then she looked up and saw the bald head, hawk nose, and stern expression of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

  Sonya had, of course, seen the captain before. He’d come down to engineering once or twice—not as often as Commander Riker or Lieutenant Commander Data—and she’d passed him in the corridor. On the latter occasions he had given her a nod and a curt, “Ensign,” obviously not knowing who she was personally, but able to discern the single pip on her uniform denoting her rank.

  This was, however, their first face-to-face encounter.

  And she spilled hot chocolate on him.

  She spilled a lot more on herself, but that somehow seemed not to matter so much.

  “Oh, no! Oh, I’m sorry, oh, Captain—”

  “Uh, actually, it’s my fault, sir.” That was La Forge, coming to her rescue. Great, first Duffy, now La Forge. Is everybody on this ship going to have to cover for me every time I do something stupid?

  “Indeed?” said the captain, sounding dubious.

  Of course he sounds dubious, you idiot. Sonya started wiping at the captain’s uniform with her hands. “Oh, I wasn’t looking—it’s all over you.”

  “Yes, Ensign, it’s all over me,” Picard said in a voice that could’ve frozen the hot chocolate, which, somehow, he was now holding in his right hand.

  “At least let me, sir,” she said, still wiping at his uniform shirt.

  The captain grabbed her wrist with his left hand to arrest her futile attempts at drying him off. “Ensign, uh—Ensign—?”

  Realizing he was making a request, Sonya straightened. “Oh! Ensign Sonya Gomez.”

  La Forge added, “Ensign Gomez is a recent Academy graduate, Captain. She just transferred over at Starbase 173.”

  “Is that so?” the captain said to La Forge. Then he looked at Sonya with an expression that wasn’t as harsh as Sonya feared it would be. “Well, Ensign Sonya Gomez, I think it would be simpler if I simply changed my uniform.”

  “Captain,” La Forge said emphatically, “I must accept full responsibility for this.”

  “Yes, Chief Engineer, I think I understand.” Picard looked at La Forge, then at Sonya.

  And then it happened again. Sonya’s mouth took off at a full run before her brain knew what was happening, and the rest of The Speech—which had been cut off by La Forge telling her he knew her background—came pouring out.

  “I just want to say, sir, that I’m very excited about this assignment, and I promise to serve you, and my ship—your ship—this ship—to the best of my ability.”

  “Yes, Ensign, I’m sure that you will.” The captain didn’t sound in the least bit sure, and Sonya couldn’t really bring herself to blame him. You don’t call it “my ship” to the captain!

  Turning to depart, Picard said, “Carry on.” Then he stopped, looked down at his right hand, and then offered the hot chocolate cup back to Sonya. Meekly, she took it, and the captain exited.

  Never in her life had Sonya Gomez more wanted the earth to swallow her up. Except, of course, they were on a starship, so she’d have to settle for something else—a warp core breach, maybe?

  “Oh, my—” She looked at La Forge, whose VISOR made it difficult to read his expression, which came to Sonya as something of a relief. “First impressions, right? Isn’t that what they say, first impressions are the most important?”

  “I’ll give you this—it’s a meeting the captain won’t soon forget.”

  La Forge walked off. Sonya stood there for several seconds. My career’s over.

  In the time it took Sonya to return to her quarters and change into a fresh uniform, the entire engine room was alive with gossip. Several people referred to her as the hot-chocolate demon, everyone cringed when she walked near the replicator, and she overheard Cliff Meyers describing the spilling of hot chocolate as “the Picard Maneuver.” By the time the lunch break rolled around, Sonya was about ready to crawl into the warp core.

  It was La Forge who again came to her rescue. “Sonya, how’d you like to get some lunch?”

  From behind him, Duffy said, “Don’t let her order a hot chocolate, Geordi!” Next to him was Denny, who snickered.

  “I’d like that very much, Lieutenant,” Sonya said meekly.

  As they walked down the corridor toward the turbolift, Sonya said, “I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am, sir. If you want to transfer me off—”

  “Now why would I do that?” La Forge chuckled. “If I transferred everyone who did something embarrassing, the engine room’d be empty in a week. All I care about is the work, and your work is excellent. I read your graduating thesis—now I wouldn’t have requested you if you weren’t the best.”